Your Character's Name: Nolan Nolan didn’t want to show exactly how anxious was to get off of the bridge. He’d somehow let Hobson sell Oren on the idea, and for the last hour of their walk the hair on his arms had been standing on end. Bridges and highways, at least the long ones left over from before the plague, were high off the ground, piled with trash, and usually had limited methods of escape; once a target got on at one end, tracking and controlling their movement was easy. A heap of rubble blocking an exit-ramp or a festering animal corpse would dissuade any but the most zealous traveler, and with a few hours preparation a small team could choose when and where their targets would to exit, and what to do with them when they tried. A few years ago, Nolan and his brothers would have been the ones waiting. Concealed by a hill, they’d have been crouched among the debris, poised to shred their chosen prey. He wondered how long a wolf could stay in sheep’s guise before it started eating the grass, and if the other wolves would recognize him when they came for the kill. Or how long until he tried to fuck the lady sheep. Against the sickly-pale blue of a morning sky that seemed to beg the question “what’s the point?”, the lumpy silhouette that grew from the crest of one of the bridge’s many hills appeared anticlimactically unthreatening. Travelers tended to navigate around most of the trash that scattered unceremoniously across the road, but some stretches of road were more magnetic to debris than others; small piles became mounds, and after so many cold winters, mounds became hills, some taller than men and long enough to get lost in. It was the docile quality that Nolan loved about the decades-old scrap mounds; they made for tremendous choke points, and could innocuously conceal an ambush big enough to knock over an MPD supply convoy. “Watch these piles” dropped curtly out of Nolan’s mouth. “I was thinking the same thing,” Hobson oozed in his slick, uncomfortably-comfortable-with-violence drawl that Nolan had yet to figure out. He moved to wrestle his three-barreled rocket launcher off of his back, but hesitated; in what Nolan hoped was a rare act of self-moderation and forethought, he instead reached into his jacket and withdrew a heavy metal pipe. Perhaps he’d briefly considered the complications of using explosives in close quarters; equally likely was that he simply wanted to hit things with a pipe, and it was that unpredictability that had prompted a few covert attempts at disarming the shoulder-cannon, which were met with further discomforting failure. “I was starting to think this walk was…uh, getting a bit boring,” Hal stammered, swallowing his own machismo. He groped blindly behind his head for the grip of the 7-iron he’d bound to his backpack. The handle dodged Hal’s grip, taunting him, parading his clumsy, contorted form around, erasing what little bit of confidence he’d projected just seconds ago. A final yank cleared freed the bludgeon, and Hal gripped it with visibly-renewed self-doubt; if Nolan hadn’t caught Hal’s left hand brush deliberately across and obscured lump in his waistband amidst the thrashing, he might have even believed Hal’s display. He must have thought his companions didn’t know he had the revolver, and Nolan only knew that he was wrong about one of them. Now it clung to Hal’s hip, hammer cocked, and if they weren’t being robbed blind or rotting in the next hour, Nolan might investigate why he still tried to hide it. Oren merely grunted his acknowledgement, a preferable alternative to him talking, which would inevitably result in him stuttering his way to whining about his sister. He simply wrapped his massive hand around the chipped wooden grip of his machete and gave a small shoulder shrug to center his pack. The savage mouths waited, and the looming mounds of debris counted down to their arrival; if the cadre had been paid for the job, the ambush would come any number of ways, depending on whether or not the traveler’s lives had been part of the contract. If the prey were to live, they’d probably try to knock Oren out of the fight first, and hold the rest of them at gunpoint while they were relieved of their possessions. If there was a best-case-scenario for being held-up, this would be it; the far more common option would come in the form of the first man in line’s head evaporating at the report of a shotgun, followed shortly by an instant scenery change to fluffy clouds and golden harps. Oren was in. The path would only fit one abreast. Of course it would. Hal, then Hobson followed, disappearing quickly behind the first jagged corner. The cold blade of adrenaline ran up his neck, standing each hair on perfect point. Where would they strike? When would they… “Hey, looks like the bridge touches down over there. There’s an MPD camp, but they’re not movin’ much. They’re behind some fences and stuff” Oren, the orator, called over the top of the rubble. There were fourteen graves, laid side by side, a small farm a day’s walk north of Rivertown. Fourteen graves, each adorned with the same small, simple glyph, the same one Nolan had scarred into his right calf. He wondered if a fifteenth grave would unite them again, or erase them forever.
Nolan didn’t want to show exactly how anxious was to get off of the bridge. He’d somehow let Hobson sell Oren on the idea, and for the last hour of their walk the hair on his arms had been standing on end. Bridges and highways, at least the long ones left over from before the plague, were high off the ground, piled with trash, and usually had limited methods of escape; once a target got on at one end, tracking and controlling their movement was easy. A heap of rubble blocking an exit-ramp or a festering animal corpse would dissuade any but the most zealous traveler, and with a few hours preparation a small team could choose when and where their targets would to exit, and what to do with them when they tried. A few years ago, Nolan and his brothers would have been the ones waiting. Concealed by a hill, they’d have been crouched among the debris, poised to shred their chosen prey. He wondered how long a wolf could stay in sheep’s guise before it started eating the grass, and if the other wolves would recognize him when they came for the kill.
Or how long until he tried to fuck the lady sheep.
Against the sickly-pale blue of a morning sky that seemed to beg the question “what’s the point?”, the lumpy silhouette that grew from the crest of one of the bridge’s many hills appeared anticlimactically unthreatening. Travelers tended to navigate around most of the trash that scattered unceremoniously across the road, but some stretches of road were more magnetic to debris than others; small piles became mounds, and after so many cold winters, mounds became hills, some taller than men and long enough to get lost in. It was the docile quality that Nolan loved about the decades-old scrap mounds; they made for tremendous choke points, and could innocuously conceal an ambush big enough to knock over an MPD supply convoy.
“Watch these piles” dropped curtly out of Nolan’s mouth.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Hobson oozed in his slick, uncomfortably-comfortable-with-violence drawl that Nolan had yet to figure out. He moved to wrestle his three-barreled rocket launcher off of his back, but hesitated; in what Nolan hoped was a rare act of self-moderation and forethought, he instead reached into his jacket and withdrew a heavy metal pipe.
Perhaps he’d briefly considered the complications of using explosives in close quarters; equally likely was that he simply wanted to hit things with a pipe, and it was that unpredictability that had prompted a few covert attempts at disarming the shoulder-cannon, which were met with further discomforting failure.
“I was starting to think this walk was…uh, getting a bit boring,” Hal stammered, swallowing his own machismo. He groped blindly behind his head for the grip of the 7-iron he’d bound to his backpack. The handle dodged Hal’s grip, taunting him, parading his clumsy, contorted form around, erasing what little bit of confidence he’d projected just seconds ago. A final yank cleared freed the bludgeon, and Hal gripped it with visibly-renewed self-doubt; if Nolan hadn’t caught Hal’s left hand brush deliberately across and obscured lump in his waistband amidst the thrashing, he might have even believed Hal’s display. He must have thought his companions didn’t know he had the revolver, and Nolan only knew that he was wrong about one of them. Now it clung to Hal’s hip, hammer cocked, and if they weren’t being robbed blind or rotting in the next hour, Nolan might investigate why he still tried to hide it.
Oren merely grunted his acknowledgement, a preferable alternative to him talking, which would inevitably result in him stuttering his way to whining about his sister. He simply wrapped his massive hand around the chipped wooden grip of his machete and gave a small shoulder shrug to center his pack.
The savage mouths waited, and the looming mounds of debris counted down to their arrival; if the cadre had been paid for the job, the ambush would come any number of ways, depending on whether or not the traveler’s lives had been part of the contract. If the prey were to live, they’d probably try to knock Oren out of the fight first, and hold the rest of them at gunpoint while they were relieved of their possessions. If there was a best-case-scenario for being held-up, this would be it; the far more common option would come in the form of the first man in line’s head evaporating at the report of a shotgun, followed shortly by an instant scenery change to fluffy clouds and golden harps.
Oren was in. The path would only fit one abreast. Of course it would. Hal, then Hobson followed, disappearing quickly behind the first jagged corner. The cold blade of adrenaline ran up his neck, standing each hair on perfect point. Where would they strike? When would they…
“Hey, looks like the bridge touches down over there. There’s an MPD camp, but they’re not movin’ much. They’re behind some fences and stuff” Oren, the orator, called over the top of the rubble.
There were fourteen graves, laid side by side, a small farm a day’s walk north of Rivertown. Fourteen graves, each adorned with the same small, simple glyph, the same one Nolan had scarred into his right calf. He wondered if a fifteenth grave would unite them again, or erase them forever.